Despite Massive Effort, School District Still Short - Questions.

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I don't have children, but as a citizen and as an uncle, a high quality, well funded public education is of huge importance to me. As a citizen, I feel critical thinking skills so necessary in our society. The lowest common denominator, horse race paradigm of much community debate on issues quite disappointing.

So the news that the Kamloops School District, after undertaking a huge effort with the community to reconfigure facilities, still faces a $2 million dollar deficit is very troubling.

I wonder a couple of things:

1) How has the expenditure on nice to haves but not strictly necessary items (yes, such as the Olympics) taken away from education spending in our province?

2) Is there any measure of the comparative success of our K-12 system in terms of encouraging critical thinking and other competencies important for today's society?

3) Where will the School District find the money and what impact will those cuts have? Can extra revenue be raised?

Comments

[Alexandra Proctor]

Multi age classrooms have potential...older students can help with younger ones, helping to teach and learning fabulous lifeskills at the same time. Possibly we are looking at this shortage from the wrong angle???
Also, ALL our government funded employees might need to realistically look at what is truely an appropriate wage??? We may all want an upper middle-class lifestyle, but our BC farmers make less than 70% of an average canadian family income... might we need to re-evaluate and re-configure before we jeopardize our childrens' futures?

[Arjun Singh]

Thanks Alexandra for your thoughts! I personally feel we should be looking at paying teachers more, and helping farmers make more as well. Everything should be on the table, but I think we should all be very sensitive to each other's livelihoods - as I painfully learnt when I mangled a blog post on Domtar back in 2007.